Chapter 16. HTTP Headers for Optimal Performance

Header composition is often neglected in the CGI world. Dynamic content is dynamic, after all, so why would anybody care about HTTP headers? Because pages are generated dynamically, one might expect that pages without a Last-Modified header are fine, and that an If-Modified-Since header in the client's request can be ignored. This laissez-faire attitude is a disadvantage when you're trying to create a server that is entirely driven by dynamic components and the number of hits is significant.

If the number of hits on your server is not significant and is never going to be, then it is safe to skip this chapter. But if keeping up with the number of requests is important, learning what cache-friendliness means and how to cooperate with caches to increase the performance of the site can provide significant benefits. If Squid or mod_proxy is used in httpd accelerator mode (as discussed in Chapter 12), it is crucial to learn how best to cooperate with it.

In this chapter, when we refer to a section in the HTTP standard, we are using HTTP standard 1.1, which is documented in RFC 2616. The HTTP standard describes many headers. In this chapter, we discuss only the headers most relevant to caching. We divide them into three sets: date headers, content headers, and the special Vary header.